Halloween Food: Piggy Coffins!

I’m a little competitive. Or, you know, a lot. Like to the point that when I meet another competitive person, I sometimes get really defensive that I’m the more competitive person. And that’s probably happened more times than I’d like to count. So where am I going with this?

Our office Halloween party is also a potluck with awards for best tasting and most creative food. Clearly, I need to win with the best Halloween food idea. Preferably both categories with a single dish. So I came up with what I’m calling Piggy Coffins. What they actually are is my Holy Shit Pork Cheeks, wrapped in puff pastry with some strategic shaping.

So the first thing to do is make a stencil of the coffin. If you plan ahead, I bet some place has cookie cutters of coffins. I went ghetto style on it and freehanded it on paper, then traced onto cardboard and cut that out. Now, for the recipe:

Scare up your Halloween food: Piggy Coffin Empanadas

What you’ll need:

One recipe of Holy Shit Pork Cheeks, which you can make overnight or while you’re at work, just make sure you let it cool before making the coffins. I made mine with pork shoulder this time, instead of cheeks, because I was too lazy to go to another store.

Puff Pastry. I used two boxes of Pepperidge Farm puff pastry, which made a total of 12 coffins, but that will vary depending on the size of your coffin and brand of puff pastry.

Your cut out coffin stencil or cookie cutter.

An egg, salt, and pepper.

A baking sheet lined with parchment paper.

How to make them:

Heat the oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit

Cut your pastry into the coffin shape. Each coffin will require two cut out coffins. I recommend putting them directly onto the parchment paper-lined baking sheet

Cut a small (or large, however you roll) cross into half of the cut out coffins. These will be your tops. I suppose you could make a stencil for these too, but they were pretty easy to do freehand with the knife.

On the cut out coffins without the crosses, pile up some of the pork filling. Check out the photo above for an example.

Lay the cut out coffin with the cross on top of the pile of pork.

Take a fork and gently push down all around the edges of the puff pastry, so that the edges are crimped and the two layers are stuck together